New Books In Literature

An interview with Jennifer Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and author most recently of The Candy House (Scribner, 2022), the story of the intersections across space and time of characters desperate to understand their interior lives. At the hub of these stories, a machine capable of capturing and sharing memories, and even offering the possibility of joining a collectivity of consciousness. Jennifer Egan, as always, balances perfectly the profound intellectual problems of existence with characters who feel deeply real by virtue of their uncommon minds. We get to talking about how her process is one of discovery through the unconscious practice of writing, and the ways in which certain ideas of what the reader should feel and experience guide her structure. We discuss her creation of the futuristic machine in The Candy House that, in the end, fashions what only the novel can produce: a window into the minds and memories of another. On the subject of movement back